Sources: National Cancer Institute; Journal of Clinical Oncology; Lancet NEOADJUVANT therapy is treatment given before primary therapy. For example, a woman may receive neoadjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer to shrink a tumor that is inoperable or a woman whose breast tumor can be removed by mastectomy may receive neoadjuvant therapy to shrink the tumor enough to allow breast-conserving [...]
Sources: Colorado Cancer Blogs; American Association for Cancer Research; BBC Health News MALE sex hormones, androgens, may provide another tool to fight breast cancer in women. Researchers from the University of Colorado Cancer Center have discovered that many breast cancers possess androgen receptors on their surface, and that male hormones like testosterone fuel the tumour's growth. [...]
Sources: BBC Health News; Jorunal Oncology THE BRCA2 gene has been linked to hereditary breast cancer and ovarian cancer. Now scientists say that as well as being more likely to get prostate cancer, men with BRCA2 are also more likely to develop aggressive tumours and have the poorest survival rates. Men with the gene should [...]
Sources: World Health Organization; BBC Health News; British Medical Journal THE World Health Organisation has issued its first guidelines on potassium intake, recommending that adults should consume more than 4g of potassium (or 90 to 100mmol) per day. This follows recent publication in the British Medical Journal which adds to the body of evidence suggesting that [...]
Source: Cancer (online Journal, March 11, 2013); American Cancer Society ASPIRIN is one of the most widely used medications in the world, with an estimated 40,000 tons of it being consumed each year. In countries where Aspirin is a registered trademark owned by Bayer, the generic term is acetylsalicylic acid (ASA). Plant extracts, including willow [...]
Sources: National Cancer Institute; US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) ON AVERAGE 1 to 2 out of every 10,000 children in the United States are diagnosed with some form of cancer. Cancer is the leading cause of death by disease among U.S. children 1 to 14 years of age. Over the past 20 years, [...]
Source: US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) MAJOR findings contained in the most current comprehensive report of cancer statistics, compiled in the United states reveals that Breast Cancer is still a leading killer of women. The three most common cancers with which women continue to be diagnosed are: 1. Breast cancer (123.1 per [...]
Sources: Bloomberg News, US Food & Drug Administration THEY have been hailed as the latest state of the art technology and their manufacturer has given them a name worthy of a medical rennaissance -the Da Vinci. But are robotic surgeries actually safer than those performed directly by the hand of a surgeon? Robot systems (da [...]
Sources: Johns Hopkins Medicine (2013, January 9). ScienceDaily (2013, February 12). RESEARCHERS at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have developed a test to detect ovarian and endometrial cancers using cervical fluid obtained in routine Pap tests. The Papanicolaou (Pap) tes is a minimally invasive screening test routinely performed during annual gynecologic visits. Cells collected from the [...]
Sources: Cancer, Vol. 119, Issue 3, Page 473, 1 February 2013; Haque R., et al. Impact of breast cancer subtypes on treatment and survival. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev.. 2012; 21: 1848-1855. ALARMING results from a Kaiser Permanente (the largest HMO in the US) study, 21 years in the making, suggest that even the most common and least aggressive subtype of [...]